A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

As you browse the internet, you may come across little orange images with the text, ‘rss’, ‘xml’, etc. Those who are tech savy tend to know that these images refer to something called an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and can make the way you read news and articles on the internet a whole lot easier. Hopefully I haven’t lost any of my readers yet who think I’ve gotten too technical with this article. Believe me, I will keep this truly informative and keep the ‘techy geek talk’ to a minimum. The reason I’ve decided to post this article here, and not on ‘Let’s Get Technical’ (my technical blog) is that I hope it provides you with a new way of reading the articles you are interested on the internet.

I’m not going to get into its history, or the way RSS works, but I’m going to explain the way you can use it. Traditionally, users go from site to site with their web browser, looking for articles they find interesting. Over time, these user’s tend to return to the same sites looking for new articles to read as they are updated. These users will re-visit each of these sites, looking for updated articles, not knowing if the site has actually been updated.

This technique of getting your daily news fix works just fine, but can lead to you wasting your time looking for updates. Imagine if you ordered 3 books from 3 different stores, but didn’t know the exact date they were going to arrive. It wouldn’t make sense to go to each of these stores 3 times a day for 6 weeks until it arrived. It would be a lot easier if the bookstores would give you a call when each one arrived. RSS works the same way. You no longer need to keep going to each of your favourite sites to see if new articles have been added - With an RSS Aggregator (an application), your articles are ‘pulled’ from the sites who’s RSS ‘feed’ you subscribe to. So, all you need to do is open you Aggregator and all of your new articles will be there waiting for you. In fact, the new versions of web browsers have this functionality built right in. As you browse internet sites, a ’syndication’ button will light up, notifying you that you can subscribe to that site’s data feed.

It’s rare for a website to not offer an RSS feed (or ATOM, a similar type of technology). If you like to read a lot of blogs, RSS is a great way to keep informed as to when each blog is updated. For instance, if you wanted to subscribe to my blogs, you would add :

• http://naiduworks.blogspot.com/atom.xml
• http://hemantnaidu.blogspot.com/atom.xml

to you aggregator (for those who are interested, click on one of the above links to see what a syndication feed looks like under the hood). The next time I updated one of my blogs, you would be able to read it in your aggregator, without ever actually visiting my blog. This works great if you read a blog where the user doesn’t post on a regular schedule.

If you want to give it a try, install one of the aggregators below:

• FeedReader
• SharpReader
• Google Desktop Sidebar

Once you get the program installed, all you need to do is add the link associated with one of these little orange ‘xml’, ‘rss’, or ‘atom’ images you see all over the place (there’s one at the bottom right of this page). To copy the link, just right click on the image, and choose ‘Copy Shortcut’. I’m not going to get into detail of how add the link to your aggregator, since each one will differ slightly. Check out the documentation that comes with the aggregator, or just ask me for some help and I’ll gladly provide some assistance. I just hope this article will motivate you to take advantage of these data feeds. I really think it will increase your productivity on the internet, letting you spend more time reading what interests you.

For more information on RSS, visit www.whatisrss.com, or on www.faganfinder.com.